Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the most bearable place to be.

... I had stayed still and let the days pass, which is the best way to allow things in the real world to dissolve or break down, although they remain forever in our thoughts and in our knowledge, solid and putrid and stinking to high heaven. But that is bearable and we can live with it. Who doesn't carry something of that nature around with them?

For me that's the only way of understanding a particular term that everyone here bandies about quite happily, but which clearly can't be quite that straight forward because it doesn't exist in many languages, only in Italian and Spanish, as far as I know, but then again, I don't know that many languages. Perhaps in German too, although I can't be sure: el enamoramiento--the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I'm referring to the noun, the concept; the adjective, the condition, are admittedly more familiar, at least in French, although not in English, but there are words that approximate that meaning ... We find a lot of people funny, people who amuse and charm us and inspire affection and even tenderness, or who please us, captivate us, and can even make us momentarily mad, we enjoy their body and their company or both those things, as is the case for me with you and as I've experienced before with other women, on other occasions, although only a few. Some become essential to us, the force of habit is very strong and ends up replacing or even supplanting almost everything else. It can supplant love, for example, but not that state of being in love, it's important to distinguish between the two things, they're easily confused, but they're not the same ... It's very rare to have a weakness, a genuine weakness for someone, and for that someone to provoke in us that feeling of weakness.

We cannot know what time will do to us with its fine, indistinguishable layers upon layers, we cannot know what it might make of us. It advances stealthily, day by day and hour by hour and step by poisoned step, never drawing attention to its surreptitious labours, so respectful and considerate that it never once gives us a sudden prod or a nasty fright. Every morning, it turns up with its soothing, invariable face and tells us exactly the opposite of what is actually happening: that everything is fine and nothing has changed, that everything is just as it was yesterday--the balance of power--that nothing has been gained and nothing lost, that our face is the same, as is our hair and our shape, that the person who hated us continues to hate us and the person who loved us continues to love us.

Gondolom, hogy neki is szüksége volt ellenségre, akit okolhat a nyomoráért. Ahogy egyébként bárki másnak, a szegényeknek, a középosztálybelieknek, a jómódúaknak és a peremre szorultaknak is. Senki sem képes elfogadni, hogy a dolgok néha úgy történnek, hogy senki sem felelős értük; hogy létezik balsors, hogy az emberek kifordulnak magukból, elvesznek, és maguknak keresik a szerencsétlenséget és az összeomlást.

Senki sem törődhet bele, hogy örökre tönkretették az életét.